


Mountain of the Moon

by Hagen



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Prehistoric, Beast Mastery, Blood Magic, Blood and Violence, Body Worship, Caves, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Guerrilla Warfare, Kidnapping, Menstruation, Mountains, Sex In A Cave, Sex Magic, Shamanism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-03 12:22:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21179375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hagen/pseuds/Hagen
Summary: Rey is a lone scavenger, traversing the wild lowlands in search of belonging.When she is stolen from her home by the savage warlord Kylo Ren, she must bear the truth of her origin, and face the uncertainty of her future in the frozen north.





	Mountain of the Moon

**Author's Note:**

> hi yes i deleted this bc i hated it and it got no traction i'm baby
> 
> [Mountain of the Moon Playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2OCBOaQUXs7rp1kpAvRrZo?si=ZTamYJQCQGK664WeXUNZgg)
> 
> So this is my attempt to somewhat rectify the godawful mess that is contemporary depiction of the prehistoric world (with the exception of Ice Age which is flawless and I won't hear a bad word about it).
> 
> I want to, through the medium of Reylo, humanise a theme that is often limited to messes like the movie 10,000BCE (entertaining, but a travesty) and the Clan of the Cave Bear series (my first love). 
> 
> Note: There is roughly one paragraph mentioning cannibalism in this chapter. Not to be a darkficcer ( _gag_ ) but, you know. It IS prehistory.__
> 
> Also, if you're here to rightfully yell at me for not updating Land's End, I'm saving it for Halloween week for sexy Samhain reasons.

_ (shite moodboard by me)_

The rabbit's nose twitched.

It turned its head west, tasting the air in its tiny lungs. It was warm. The wind came down from the western woods with the heat of the lowlands. Its eyes were large and black and wet. It could scarcely see in the high grass.

A hunched crow cawed from above, and the air tasted red and unsafe.

Across the meadow, the grass whispered in the breeze. A girl crouched there in lionskins, an arrow nocked on a bow, its string drawn bar. She was tense and still. The rabbit did not see her.

It heard the thrum of the arrow before it could move, and saw the stone point of it whistling through the air.

Rey raced through the grass and snatched it up by the ears when it fell, squeaking madly. She pulled the arrow free and put it on her back, and when the creature's neck was lolling limp she lashed twine about its hind legs and hung it from her belt.

She was hungry - she was always hungry - and food would not fall from the sky.

Rey crossed the long meadow, hungry eyes sharp. At its edge, close to the dark wet banks of the rushing river, she found a great red mass of leaves and crouched as she rummaged through them for berries; fat and grey-blue like storm-skies, and so sweet that a flood of saliva pricked at the inside of her cheeks. When she found them, she slung her basket off of her back, and set to filling it.

Some she ate as she picked, staining her fingers purple. She licked them clean. Some of the wicker had frayed free, piercing a berry like a boar on a spit. Rey ate that, too, and pulled the ties of the basket tight. The thought of boar made her stomach growl horribly and heart pound in equal measure.

She trailed the cluster of bushes for hours, picking and eating until her basket was full. She pushes through the bushes and slid down the riverbank when she came to it, muddying her back, clinging to the low branch of a sapling ash and bending it until her feet touched the wetter mud at the riverside. The sapling flew back with a snap when she let go. A great flock of birds shot out of the trees beyond. Rey’s hungry mouth fell slack, but her hungry hands moved quickly.

She notched an arrow - fletched with grey feathers - and shot in time to pierce one, a fat pigeon straggling behind the rest.

It fell. Rey clambered back up the bank; the air was still and warm, but the mud was cold. she searched the grass for it. Grass seeds stuck to her muddy footwraps. She took long strides back through the meadow, hands trailing in the grass’s feathery tops. She found it still-twitching with an arrow protruding from its breast, and hung it from her belt, too. The rabbit and the pigeon stared lifelessly at one another, dead heads colliding as Rey shifted the basket on her back and started for home.

Rey didn't know when she came here, or who brought and left her. She didn't remember not being here, in the deep of the green valley and the flat of the lowlands.

She simply remembered being always alone.

She remembered being young and stumbling to the edge of the green wood and facing the sky, and realising that half of it was swallowed by the rise of black mountains, peaks icy and white.

One rose higher and darker and thicker capped with snow than the rest. It rose so high that, when the moon was full, the sharp summit seemed to pierce her cruelly.

Those that she knew called it the Mountain of the Moon.

From the reaches of the thick green wood to the flat of the steppes at the foot of the Mountain was Sawelpa land; the people of the sun.

They were proud and often callous. Rey had no mother, and so the motherly Sawelpa called her a lone rat and gave her nothing. They were blessed by their own gods. They were sun-walkers with food and heat and friends. Their _woikos_ was walled high and tight with sharp timber and clay. Within it the Sawelpa walked with their skin painted in long stripes of immaculate white and sun-stones strung about their necks and wrists and waists and ankles.

Sun-stone was bright and deep blue - the same colour as the sky when clouds abandoned it - and grew hot under the solar heat. This, to the Sawelpa, was the heat of their gods on their skin, guiding them, and so to them the stones were precious.

Rey could find the sun-stones in the walls of the rocky faces in the lowlands. She was able to seek out the veiny glimmer of dulled blue in the bare sheets of stone and dig them out with antler and bone and chunks of granite. She knew how to take her antler and follow the dank, dripping passages under the earth where great walls of blue shone under her torch, and bring them to the Sawelpa in exchange for food.

It was how she survived; scavenging gems for fat fool sun-walkers. She would have killed to be one of them.

She was thin, bones apparent under her skin. Her hair was brown and she knew from staring intently into the river that her eyes were dark, her face thickly freckled. She had not bled woman’s blood for so long that she did not remember her last bleed.

Finn told her that it was because of hunger.

Anything beyond the foot of the mountains belonged to a people Rey had never seen, only heard of. The stories she was told made them giants in the north, great and beastly, hulking in pale furs, mouths bloody. Behind them they dragged axes of stone so huge that they could slice a man in half with a single swing.

There were no rites in the mountains, no treaties; the bloody giants walked with mammoths and bears and direwolves, and they took as they pleased. They were called Wolouk, those of the bear and the moon, and though Rey had never seen one, she thought of them often, and when she had black dreams it was the giant Wolouk she dreamed of. They were faceless in her dreams.

Finn told her these stories. Everything she knew of outside of the lowlands came from Finn. He was still a sun-walker, still deeply proud, but they knew one another. His stories felt like food. They dissipated the hunger for knowledge in her head, but never for long.

The mountains were stark and harsh. The face they showed Rey was black and white, snow and jagged rock. On their eastern faces they were lush and green and thick with game, but those were only stories Rey had been told.

The peaks of the mountains -- though shrouded in mist more often than not -- were icy and white with snow. Rey could only imagine the pain of the cold and the ice. The snowy summit crawled with white wolves as big as rhino and bears blacker than night. The mammoths on the mountains were so big that they darkened half the sky; meat enough for a half a sun-turn, half of one entire year.

Rey's stomach growled at the thought of so much food, so much fur, so much bone; food to cram her mouth with, fur to warm her skin, bone and tusk to break and carve into points and sell and eat and-

No one dared venture there, even so. The Wolouk would tear any outsiders limb from limb -- or so the stories said. Rey rather thought, as she followed the water upriver, that she would risk it for all that food. She was small and quick and quiet. She could trek across the flat of the lowlands to the steppes, and begin her ascent. If she cut across the icy hip of the mountain and found a mammoth, she could eat on the slopes until she was sick, and then bring the rest home, dragging it on a sled.

It was often told that a Wolouk would never go hungry. They didn't hunt little mammoths -- babes as big as boulders - like the others, but full-grown bulls with bone-pale tusks like twisted trees. The Wolouk hunted bears and wolves and rhino and ate them, too, and wore their furs and never went cold.

They stole the food of the Sawelpa. They could be relied upon to arrive every sunturn, often in spring when the Mountain thawed, and take grain and fruit and meat. Finn rarely went into detail about the encounters, only that the submission of the lowlanders and their food was tantamount to their continued existence.

Some stories said that they ate the flesh of other men. Finn had recounted those tales to her, shuddering, and each time Rey would pretend that she found it dark and frightening, too.

She kept her secrets to herself. Meat - even of men -- was better than tree-bark or grass or acorns.

The bark scraped her throat no matter how well she chewed it and the acorns made her teeth ache. Grass felt like nothing in her stomach, though she would eat it until her teeth were green and the juice ran down her chin.

There was shame in wasting meat, regardless of where it came from.

Finn came from the _woikos_, not far from here. They had more food than her, and shelter and one another, but Rey wasn't one of them. She wasn't a Sawelpa, discerned by the shine of blue stones at wrists or throat or ears, swipes of white paint on their faces. She was simply Rey - grey pebbles about her neck instead of shimmering blue -- and simply no-one.

She had found a clutch of blue woad, once -- a mountain plant and a rarity in the lowlands -- and crushed it under a rock and painted her pebbles blue, so that she might feel like one of them. The others had laughed at her desperation when they saw her, trailing into the _woikos_, and Finn had tentatively cleaned the blue from the stones for her, full of pity.

Rey picked along the riverside. Across the water, the bony hills rose up. There was a little crevice there in the hillside, a black vein in the rock.

Home.

Rey crossed the river, leaping from slippery stone to slippery stone. Before the hillside, she crossed over a long meadow, eyes sharp for food. A fruit tree hung over her chasm that had died long ago, black and gnarled and brittle. Rey came clear of the grass and dropped her basket and her meat. She squeezed herself through the gap in the hot rock, reached back out into the sun for what she had left, and carried her things into the dark.

She had meat on her mind as she clacked pearly flint for sparks, sparks for fire to cook.

Home was a cavern, stout and bowled and concealed as a mere split in the sun-paled rock of the hillside. It was deep enough that the wind and the rain would not reach her. She could hide in its shadow. Big beasts like lions or bears or bad-cats could scarcely fit through the crack of rock that made the cave its entrance. It was there that she lived and there, she supposed, that she would likely die.

Rey had battled many scrapes with death, and yet not enough to be hardened to it.

She had narrowly evaded the mouths of angry lions, racing to steal a hank of meat from their unattended kills. Her mistakes in grappling rock faces to find nests of eggs were seldom, but the few footholds she had missed almost sent her tumbling to her end on the rocks below. Sometimes she felt the eyes of wolves on her in the long green forests. They often stalked her back to her rock. She would lie trembling on her bedroll as they sniffed and pawed at the chasm, crying and howling until dawn.

Then there were the others -- lone walkers like her -- that saw her thin frame outside the cleft of the cavern, weaponless but for a knife and a bow, and thought her weak.

Rey misliked that greatly. She was always hungry, but years of it had hardened her to that, at least, and she could go for weeks with just a handful of treebark to keep her walking.

Rey had not known who he was.

It was a foul and bitter winter, so cold that she was sure her fingers would blacken and die. The winds had come so fiercely that the berries froze and shrivelled. The rabbits turned white and hid in their warrens. Rey had not a single scrap of food left save for drying grass and bark. Her bones felt like rocks, and a digging, gnawing agony had overtaken her from throat to stomach. She was trying to muster the might to rise and carry her stones to the woikos, propped against the crack of the cavern.

He was thin like her. He saw that she had no food, and kicked her aside. Rey was weak, and screeched as he snatched the blue stones up, turned on his heel, and ran. She cried because the stones were all that bought her admittance into the woikos. She was too weak with hunger to even dream of digging more out of the rocky walls.

He raced through the snow, leaping over a tree root. Rey was not so weak that she couldn't raise her bow and send through the back of his neck an arrow with a head lethal from days of starved, half-mad whetting.

He was struck, flint flying out through the front of his throat in a spray of red, and he fell.

At first, she had not considered it. She dragged herself across the snow, rage fueling her, and crouched beside him, ripping the blue stones from the pouch at his hip. She kept spitting on him, cursing, striking the limp corpse with weak fists.

_Evil, evil, evil, thieving stealing beast-!_

Steam rose from the bloody wound. Rey had stared at it, and it was red-red-red in the snow around them.

She had precious few people to tell and would take this secret to the grave. It was a blurred memory -- not with the faintness of memories formed in distant youth, but blurred with the pain of hunger, desperation. Rey pulled the arrow free. Black-red spewed from the wound, soaking the fur he had worn and pooling in the snow, melting it pink. She remembered her hand shaking around the knife-handle, and then there was more blood, and bone, and meat. She remembered ribs and gristle scraping her palms as she tore them free and after a while her stomach felt so full she could have been sick.

But she wasn't. She ate and she ate. She dragged herself to the stream and drank until there could have been water brimming at the back of her throat. She stole his clothes -- lionskin britches and a tunic she cut to size, a thick goatskin that warmed her chest and footwraps that fit snugly - and then slept for what could have been days. When she awoke, the thief was nothing but a ruined ribcage and a discarded leg, and there were lion prints in the snow.

She had taken herself to the village quickly, then, her pack full of stones and her bones full of strength. She did not want to survive hunger and be killed by full lions.

Rey thought of it now, skinning the rabbit. She eyed the pigeon, dead on the belt. She needed salt -- her supply was dwindling -- and for that she needed to go to the _woikos_, and she needed something to trade the Sawelpa. She cut off the rabbit's head, spitted it, and watched it roast, stomach growling. She reached for a precious clay pot -- traded for a blue stone the size of her hand -- and nibbled frugally at honeycomb, staring at the sizzling rabbit. It was bathed in flame.

Rey scavenged and foraged. She sold antler and bone, cleaned and carved, and rats tied together by the tail, and anything else she could find. Now, she needed salt and fruit and more meat than she had or could catch alone. She covered the rabbit haunches in honey and ate them quickly. She tore at the rest of the meat as she walked, pigeon resting atop of the blue stones and carved bone in her pack.

She often felt vile for it. She wondered if others would have done it, if they had starved as she had, if the man had stolen from them the only thing guarding them from certain death. Part of Rey felt wrong for having done it and part of her was oddly proud; starving and weak and yet she took the thief's life and saved her own.

She had killed him because, by stealing her stones, he meant to kill her. She wondered if she could kill someone that had done naught to her, for food, if she was starving again.

She could hear the noise of the _woikos_ and of the Sawelpa before she reached it. This wasn't Home. Home had no people but her. The people here knew her as different, and she them.

She was but one, where the Wolouk were many, and she wasn't a danger to the Sawelpa like the giants were. She was welcomed because she came with her pack full of bone and herbs and those blue stones that they held dear, but her welcome was stiff and sparse.

Rey wasn't sure how they would take her otherwise. She banged on the timber of the gate and someone peered over. They saw her and pulled the rope of the gate so that she could push past.

There were huts and tents here, made of grass and beast-hides. Rey had been in one, once, and they were so warm she very nearly fell asleep where she stood. She could see, as she ran her hand along a mammoth-skinned wall, a pack of the Sawelpa rolling logs down the incline that crashed into a pile. Others were hefting them up into post-holes. Rey watched them. They were building more walls.

That made her stomach churn. More walls meant fewer outsiders -- or none at all -- and what would she do then? Rey swallowed hard. She passed them and they looked at her, some bare-chested with loins girded in white-spotted deerhide, some with dark fur from neck to knee. They glittered all with sun-stones, faces painted in bold and chalky stripes, and when the sun was too-bright in Rey's eyes the Sawelpa became little more than shifting spirits of sky-blue and sun-white.

She could hear some of them singing.

Rey touched the wall again. She had seen mammoths before while hiding in the grasses to catch rabbits, rats -- anything. Often they stared and did nothing, but some -- mothers with calves -- charged at her and roared so that she ran. She knew that it was custom for the Sawelpa to hunt them. Rey could never do something so great herself, though she dreamed of it. The skin and fur was so thick that one could stand naked in a blizzard and feel nothing, the meat tender and savoury

Rey suppressed the urge to rip the skin from the wicker wall and run. Stealing would do nothing but have her cast out of the _woikos_, or killed.

They had so much food here.

Rey found herself, as she trailed through the woikos, gawping at sizzling meat over fires, great baskets of apples and pears and grain, hide bags that she knew were full of cheese in the making. Her stomach rumbled despite what she had eaten. She was always hungry, and the tightness of her bones beneath her skin told the world the very same.

They didn't care.

Finn had brought her food before, but the others found out, and he was whipped with tree branches and threatened with exile. Rey shuddered at the memory of the raised pink welts on his back, bleeding. It was not, Rey consoled herself, as though he had not tried, because he had, and now with his life under threat he had to stop.

She understood, though she loathed it. For a place in the _woikos_, for food and safety and warmth until the end of her life, Rey would have given the world, and anyone in it.

Rey presented her wares to a fat man with a deer-mask covering his eyes, carved antlers protruding high and sharp. Rey would have died to be so fat, but not as foul as he was.

"When was this killed?" Unkar asked, picking up the pigeon.

"This morning," she griped. She knew that it was still warm in his fat hand.

"This morning," he repeated. "What do you want for it?"

"Eight pears."

"Eight-"

"Eight," she said, hand hovering over the pigeon. "Or you don't get the stones either."

He made to pick them for her, but she declined. She didn't want the bruised ones, mushy like tiger shit, and so picked seven of the biggest and most unripe. The last she chose was golden and perfect -- she would eat that on the way home.

When she took out the jagged, unpolished stones, fresh from rock-walls, he grunted, folding his arms across his chest.

"And for those?"

"A handful of salt, two cuts of salt-bison, and three mammoth cuts."

"They aren't carved."

Desperation carefully blanketed under nonchalance, she said, "I can always take them elsewhere."

He grizzled and complained, but complied. "Your hand," she said sharply, when he reached for the bag of salt and held it out to her so that her handful might be smaller. She watched closely as he sliced the meat. It had been a long time since he had tried to cheat her, but she had never trusted him, and never would.

She passed one great fire and heard a familiar call.

Finn was dark-skinned with moon-white teeth, skin made ever darker besides the chalky white of his face-paint and the blue of the sunstones about his neck. He was standing by another pit, not a careful distance from the flames -- the Sawelpa fell on their knees to the sun, and thought of the fire as its being on the earth; they didn't care if they were burnt -- waving at her. She could see another familiar form sitting, a hulk compared to even Finn's broad, stout body.

The mammoth-men were rare, she knew, and dying.

She had found their skulls in the past. Mammoth-men were great bulky things with red hair and brows so heavy the eyes became blue half-moons in their faces. Often a lone one could be found wandering, sick and starved, in the lowlands. They spoke little, and grunted, but could be taught many words.

The Sawelpa had found one the same, and fed him until he was fat and strong. They called him Chew-bacca -- 'the good one' -- for his fine nature; so very unlike the other stragglers of his kind that grasped their skulls and wept as though in pain, and charged at any that approached.

Chewbacca turned, hands on the ground, when Finn called and she called back, and stood to greet her with an embrace that could, if angered, crush her bones.

He lifted her clean off the ground and said her name. His voice was thick and garbled, throat and tongue struggling hard around the words he had been taught. "_Rey_," he repeated, and when he put her down Finn held her, too. His chalky paint left a faint white mark on the side of her face, her chest. Finn had dappled deerskin, fresh and newly tanned, where she only had the dead thief's thinning old lionskins.

Even Chewbacca, a mammoth-man, had a gird and a cowl of good and fine lion-hide. He didn’t have a mother, but they welcomed him even so.

Rey swallowed her jealousy.

When she pulled away, there was a wolf, white and staring and up to her waist, and her hand went for her knife before she told it to.

"He's mine, Rey!" Finn exclaimed. "Look, look at him! Watch."

He bent, hand outstretched -- Rey recoiled, waiting for blood -- and scratched the wolf under its chin. It leaned on him, not looking away from her.

Rey stared back at it. "How --"

"Friend-wolf, they're called. Isn't he beautiful? One of the others found him as a pup and reared him friendly."

That was something about the _woikos_ she hated. They always had things -- good and fine and beautiful things, warm places to sleep, so much to eat -- and then they wanted more.

They sat together at the pit. Rey didn’t like the wolf and didn’t want it near her. She remembered the nights she spent with wolves pawing and crying hungrily at her cavern. She didn’t look away from it even so. Finn would bring food, and so that occupied her mind.

Taking food out of the _woikos_ for anyone but the Sawelpa was a crime, and merited whipping. Finn still had the long pale welts on his back from where he had been ashed. He gave Rey three apples and half a duck, hot and greasy.

She ate so quickly she was sure she was like to bring it all back up again. He gave her water, too, in a new skin.

Chewbacca could eat an apple in three whole bites. Rey felt that way sometimes - all the time.

The friend-wolf huffed and growled at Finn when its food came out. He had for it a bison's thigh, raw and dripping, recently butchered. Rey looked around for the rest, nowhere in sight. The wolf snatched the bone from Finn's hand and crept away from them to gnaw at it. It slouched down on its belly, cradling its food between its front paws, watching them as it grazed its teeth against the bare bone. Rey didn't like the yellow of its eyes, but wanted to see. Finn stroked the back of its head and it grizzled, but kept eating. Chewbacca made a concerned sound.

Rey took a step forward. Chewbacca held out a thick paw to stop her from moving closer. "He eat," he said, pressing his hand against her shoulder. "Stay."

She pushed his hand away. "I want to see."

"_Stay_," the mammoth-man repeated, nostrils flaring, His eyes were blue, but he was ugly. His brow was so heavy that it hooded the blue eyes almost entirely in a perpetual scowl. His jaw jutted outwards beneath his puck lower lip and his yellow teeth protruded over his upper like a sharp-cat's. The back of his hand was gnarled and twisted with tooth-scars. She examined them. Chewbacca grunted, eyes on the friend-wolf.

"_Wild_ wolf," she heard Finn say. He was watching her, cross-legged on the ground. "That's what bit him. That's why he doesn't want you near it."

"_This_ one's a wild wolf."

"No," Finn insisted. "It's tame. If it was wild it would run or it would eat you."

Rey had faced a lone wolf in the open before and cast rocks at it until it fled. It would have been very different if the wolf brought its pack.

She looked, suddenly bitter, at Finn's wolf. "I want one," she said.

"You have to find a pup, then, if you want one. You have to rear it," Finn told her. "Or buy one."

Rey rolled her eyes at him, though the word 'buy' made her stomach clench. With what? she wanted to demand. "Maybe. Where do I find one?"

"It depends. You have to track a pack or find a den."

"Which is safer?"

"Neither."

Rey's shoulders slumped, defeated. She couldn't frighten away a whole pack by throwing stones. She watched the wolf eat and made a face. Even a beast was better fed than she was.

"What did you give for it?" she asked Finn.

"Meat. Lots of it. And tusks.” Finn leaned over and scratched the wolf's rear, snatching his hand away when it grizzled at him. "It'll be worth it, though. It can hunt for me. I can't hunt, say, a bison all by myself. But with a wolf, I could, and with a wolf that won't turn around and take my hand off afterwards - even better. You should get one."

"How am I supposed to do that?" she asked him, finding herself getting heated. "It's easy for you to tell me to get one. You have one and you don't even need it."

He shifted uncomfortably, lost for words. Chewbacca stopped watching the wolf and looked at them instead, uneasy at the change in tone. Rey didn't take her eyes away from Finn's white-chalked face.

"Well?" she demanded.

"You could make an axe," Finn suggested. "You could find a den, and --" He trailed off when he saw her face.

Chewbacca was looking at her. He had a club-- a great hunk of stone lashed to a piece of wood with lion-gut -- and made a sound at the word 'axe'. "_Axe_," he repeated. "Axe, here. Axe." It wasn’t an axe, but he held it out to her, and the sheer weight of it made her arms drop.

The mammoth-man took it back, apologetic.

She was fast, not strong, though she would have liked to have been. She gave Chewbacca a poke to make him smile, but he looked at her with a blank face. She poked him again. Chewbacca's mouth spread in a yellow half-moon. "_Mamaf_," she jibed him, and he smacked at her hands, grinning.

Finn pushed her aside and smacked Chewbacca's thick hand away. They became locked and fell to the grass. The friend-wolf forgot his bone and rose up and yipped at the laughter, the noise.

Finn squawked when Chewbacca pinched the flesh of his hips. The beast brushed past Rey and she let her fingers drag against the white fur, longing and loathing. It turned and looked, sniffed, and went to play, barking excitedly.

Their struggles stamped out the last of the fire. Finn’s gird caught smoke and he smacked it cool. Chewbacca twisted his head to the side and moaned in unease, staring at the dying embers. It was a noise of fear, distress.

"What's he doing?" Rey asked.

"He didn't know how to make fire, before he came here. He thought that once it went out, it was out and that was it," Finn explained. "He still doesn't understand. His kind would have someone guarding a little speck of wildfire for months."

He climbed off the mammoth-man and crouched at the pit. Chewbacca crawled to its edge on his belly, staring. When Finn paused, the big man balled his fists and tapped them together as though they were two flints, grunting.

"Make," he said.

"Wait," Finn told him, fumbling in his pouch.

Chewbacca showed him his teeth. "_Make_."

"Why don't you _show_ him how to do it?" Rey asked.

"Maz said not to. She said he's too dumb and that he'll set the whole _woikos_ on fire."

Rey didn't think so. Chewbacca's words were few and far between, but she didn't doubt that he could understand, and she didn't think him stupid. She observed him as he watched Finn. The Sawelpa kept him as a sort of novelty -- a novelty that could shift boulders and kick down trees -- but even he had their blue stones. They glittered on hide at his fat ankles so that he didn't rip the strings and scatter the stones hither and yon.

Maz thought that everyone was stupid. No one dared confront her on it. She walked with a hunch and had black eyes like wood-beetles in a weathered, sun-brown face striped with white. She was their conduit to the worlds beyond, to the gods.

Rey often wondered about shamans. Maz wore deerskin about her head with the antlers still intact, so heavy it made her head loll and bow, and would drink stream-water and crushed ants and herbs that she knew, if eaten, made the eater see wild things - wild things, terrible things; things so frightening that a girl might drop dead of shock -- that sang to her.

Maz would dance and babble in tongues Rey had never known, spirit-eyes bright and shining, and afterwards she would paint what she saw on the high cavern walls where the Sawelpa laid the bones of their dead to rest.

Her tent was built to protect the skull of a mammoth. Maz - and all the Sawelpa - was its guardian. It was called _Saputi_ \- the guide, the landstrider.

The Sawelpa spoke to Saputi, danced around him, left food between his tusks. The skull had a great crown of antlers circling its head, strewn with flowers, and strings of teeth and ears and claws and sunstone hanging from its tusks. Finn said that those were dreams and wishes.

The Sawelpa dreamed their dreams and wished their wishes to Saputi, and he would bring them into truth.

Rey thought they were all silly. She wanted to be one of them even so.

Rey had only known of Saputi and his wishes through stories told to her by Finn. She was an outsider and was not privy to these spirit-dances, let alone admitted entrance into the sacred chambers of the dead.

She wolfed down stories the way she wolfed down food.

Finn was clacking the stones together. Rey watched Chewbacca, fixated on the sparks. She wondered if she could tempt him away to live with her. He didn't speak but he understood, and she could talk to him and he could hunt and she wouldn't be alone, she wouldn't be hungry. Lone walkers wouldn’t try to hurt her if they saw him.

Finn scraped the stones. Sparks flew and set the embers alight once more. Chewbacca grabbed his wrist and said, "Show."

"No! You know you're not allowed, stop."

Chewbacca tapped his hulking bruised fists together insistently, deep brow furrowing deeper. Finn insisted, "_No_."

"I'll show him," Rey offered. "Chewbacca. _Mamaf_. Look at me."

He didn't, focused on Finn. Rey barked, "Hey! Look at me."

She tapped her fists together and he rose to a crouch. "Show. Yes? I'll show you."

"You can't," Finn told her,

"Why not? I'm not one of you, I can teach him what I like."

Chewbacca came to crouch by her, tapping his fists together insistently. "Show," he repeated. "Fire, make."

"Not yet. But I will. I promise." When he looked blank, she said, slowly, "I will."

"Now!"

"No, not now. Later. You come with me.”

She nodded and he nodded back, slowly understanding.

Finn said, “You can’t. He’s not allowed.”

Rey decided that she didn't care what he thought. It was easy for Finn, who'd had food and friends and warmth alike since birth. He had never starved. He had never thought that he was going quite mad in his solitude. She turned her head away, too proud to look at him.

There they sat awhile, watching the wolf eat. When it was done, it licked the bone clean and came to investigate Rey. It growled when she flicked it away, uneasy, but was happy enough to lie between her and Chewbacca, head on its paws.

Finn brought Rey another apple.

The wolf huffed. It lifted its head and stared at the gate and huffed again.

"What?" Finn asked it, as if it would answer.

_Huff_. Its muzzle began to twitch. _Huff_. Chewbacca got to his feet and stared at the gate. _Huff_.

There was a great bellowing, bringing their heads turning to the north. Rey recognised it as a bone-horn, a death-sound. She had often heard it, echoing faintly through the valley as it rolled down the mountains like an avalanche, but had always hidden from it in the crack of the cave, the quiet of the lowlands.

Finn stood up straight and Chewbacca made a frightened noise, bending to cradle the wolf and Rey both. The beast slipped out from under him, hackles raised.

**_Aaaaaaaaaawoooooooooooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa_**-

A woman, nearby, cried out, sweeping her child up into her arms. A trumpeting roar followed her cry that rumbled through the ground and rattle Rey's bones. Finn grabbed Rey's wrist, and the urgency of it made her pale. The watchers on the walls roared, “Close the gates! _Close the gates_!”

“Why are they here?”

“Spring has passed! Why are they here?”

“What do they want?”

“Hide!”

"Spirits," Finn whispered, an expletive, "_mamaf_."

"What is it?" she asked him, and then, urgently, as Chewbacca gripped at her shoulder, "It's probably just mammoths, Finn-"

"No, no, not mammoths." He swallowed. "It’s _Wolouk_ \- Rey, you have to go. You have to go _home_, Rey -”

He dragged her up off the ground. “Go, Rey! _Go_!”

There was an almighty **_creaaaaaaaak_** and a crash as the gates were pulled shut. Rey turned towards them. There was another bellowing sound.

**_Aaaaaaaawooooooooaaaaaaaa_**; the blowing of a horn.

The timber walls were closing in. The Sawelpa that could fight were snatching up their long, blue-tipped spears, their liongut slings. Those that couldn't were facing their god in desperation. She could see them gathering at the tent, kneeling before the skull, tears, terror.

“Let her go,” Finn roared at the wall watchers, dragging Rey by the arm. The terror had her panicking, pulling. Something was wrong. “Let her _out_, she isn’t Sawelpa**_, let her go_**!”

One of the watchers was screaming from the high walkway, “_Mamaf! Es ore mamaf!”_

The Sawelpa watcher that Finn shouted at made for the gates to fasten them. Rey raced after him in horror. As he did, something rammed against it from the other side.

_**Bang**_. Whatever hit the high gates before hit them again.

“They’re coming from the south!” someone screamed. _**Bang**_. Rey heard it then, unmistakeably; a mammoth’s roar - so close it hurt her head. “They have the beast at the gates!”

“Rey, come on.” Finn was pulling at her. The friend-wolf was barking madly behind them. _**Bang**_. Rey was frozen to the spot. “We have to hide, come on!”

Two great tusks smashed through the high gate.

Wood flew in all directions. A great hunk of it flew past Rey’s ear and struck a child behind her. The wolf was caught in the flank by a flying slag of wood. The walkway collapsed, the walls groaned. Rey watched one of the watchers fall from the walkway above.

The tusk pierced his back and emerged through his chest. Blood cascaded from his body. He screamed still, and those that saw him did, too.

The mammoth shook its head and rained blood over them all. Before Finn pulled her behind him, shrouding her in a skin torn from the wicker wall of a grain-tent, Rey saw, over his shoulder, a giant in grey.

It did not walk alone.

**Author's Note:**

> The language peppered into this fic is Proto-Indo-European, a proto-language developed by anthropologists and linguists. If you have played the game Far Cry Primal (you should, because it's amazing) the entire game is spoken in P.I.E., and it's a beautiful sounding tongue in my opinion.
> 
> I spent a while piecing together tribal names, etc, for authenticity, and will explain below.
> 
> Translations:
> 
> WOIKOS: village (woy-koss)
> 
> SAWELPA: sun-people (sah-wel-pah)
> 
> WOLOUK: people of the moon and the bear (woo-luke)
> 
> SAPUTI: the wisher (sah-poo-tea) 
> 
> ES ORE MAMAF: it's a mammoth (ess oray mah-maf)
> 
>   
The people call Chewbacca a mammoth-man (because I'm taking liberties and pretending Neanderthals lasted til 10,000BC) because I like to imagine they likened Neanderthals' massive supraorbital ridges and wide ass bodies to mammoth bones.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this chapter if you're new, and if you've read it before I hope you liked it the second time! I love interacting with my readers so if anyone has questions/comments about any of my work, you can hit me up on:
> 
> Twitter @hagenshull (with a U)  
Tumblr @hagenshall (with an A)
> 
> xx B


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